Precious Thing

by Mcbeth, Colette

Outside the police station I slumped down next to the railings. The wind screamed up from the sea. I lifted my face to it in the hope it would wake me from my stupor. Why, Why, Why? Why was he with you, Clara? Why hadn’t you met me? Anger coursed through me, tingling as it ran up my spine and down my arms to the tips of my fingers. The idea of Jonny betraying me with you was so alien it had no place inside my head. I would never believe it, not unless I saw it with my own eyes. All I had seen so far was the two of you together. No one knew what had happened. The police were making assumptions that had no basis in reality.

  You see Clara, I trusted Jonny. I would have trusted him with my life. But you? I began to wonder if I even knew you. When you came back after all that time away I thought we could pick up where we left off. Naively, I thought I could recreate that closeness again through sheer force of will. God knows I put the effort in. I wanted to be there to look after you, support you. And I thought it was working. The memory of us all on the skiing trip came back to me: you and me and Jonny and his friend Luke, the four of us together at Christmas. It was only a month ago but it felt like it belonged to a different age, when I was someone else and so were you. All day long we had been carving down slopes under a cloudless sky, floating on powder at the top of a mountain, thinking we’d gone to heaven. When we reached the bottom our smiles lit up our whole faces. We were full of life, bursting with it.

  ‘My round,’ you shouted as you removed your sunglasses. Your face was tanned and red and glowing. The skin around your eyes was white.

  ‘Panda eyes,’ I teased.

  ‘You’re just jealous because I beat you on the slopes, although …’ and you nudged me so I fell over in the snow, ‘you’ve been getting some practice in my absence.’

  You disappeared into the bar and emerged with four large beers in frosted glasses.

  We sat on the terrace overlooking the piste and the mountains in the late winter sun and all agreed beer had never tasted so good.

  ‘So Clara, come on, what else can you beat Rachel at?’ It was Luke, Jonny’s friend who obviously fancied you.

  ‘Swimming, tennis …’

  ‘All right, sport wasn’t my thing at school. But I do have some skills.’ I stood up and held the beer out in front of me.

  ‘Don’t tell me you can still do that?’ you asked incredulously.

  ‘Some things never leave you,’ I laughed, wondering if I could still pull it off, and then I took the beer, threw my head back and downed it. I heard the cheers from Luke and Jonny and you.

  ‘Bloody hell.’ Jonny was sitting mouth wide open, eyes laughing. ‘I didn’t realise my girlfriend had such hidden talents.’

  ‘From my ladette days,’ I said, planting a kiss on his lips. ‘Now I am a ladee on TV I don’t do it so much. And to mark my achievement I think we should have a group photo now.’ I handed my camera to a snowboarder next to us. ‘Vous pouvez prendre un photo, s’il vous plaît?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, no problems mate,’ he replied in a thick Essex accent which made us collapse with laughter.

  We huddled together, sunglasses on our heads, squinting in the sun. I remember wanting to preserve the memory of that moment forever, to stop it fading in time.

  When I got home I printed the photograph out and put it in my wallet. Now I found myself looking for it as I walked away from the police station. It was still there, the shot of the four of us, under a sinking Alpine sun. Then my tears fell on the paper – finally, tears – and the colours leaked into each other so our faces became blotchy and smudged. I could hardly see Jonny any more, I couldn’t see myself, but the smile on your face remained.

  Heading back to the hotel I called him, ten times over. Each time I listened to his voice, willing it to come alive. But it was only a recording, trapped in time on his answerphone. I had heard it so often I knew where the pause would come, which words he stressed, even the slam of the door in the background.

  ‘Hi, it’s Jonny, sorry I can’t pick up, leave a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.’

  As soon as I can. When would he call me? I had never wanted to talk to someone so much, to spill out my fears and have them dismissed, gently: Rach, it’s OK, I can explain everything.

  The not-knowing, the waiting, made me want to claw at my eyes in frustration.

  Nick, Luke and Sandra. They were the three names that stood out as I scrolled through my contacts book; Jonny’s friends and his mother. I needed to call them in case he had been in touch but I wasn’t ready to tell them the full story. I wasn’t prepared to create a chain reaction, passing my fears and worries from one person to another and giving the situation the oxygen to breathe and grow and mutate into something far more serious than I hoped it was.

  In the end I only spoke to Luke.

  ‘Hi, I can’t get through to Jonny, I don’t suppose he has called you,’ I asked, trying to sound light and breezy.

  ‘Rachel … eh, no I’m sorry, I haven’t heard from him. Look, I’m right in the middle of something at work, can I call you back?’

  ‘No, it’s fine, that’s all I wanted to know.’

  Nick didn’t pick up so I left him a message. And Sandra; I couldn’t bring myself to call her. Not yet anyway.

  I escaped Brighton that evening, exploiting the small window of opportunity before it started snowing again. Jake said he’d come with me and I was surprised to find I was relieved. I didn’t want to talk. I just needed to feel a friendly presence close to me after hours of hostile combat with DCI Gunn.

  ‘So where did you get to?’ We were barely out of Brighton. Jake’s tolerance for silence was much lower than mine.

  ‘Just seeing a few people,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you had no family left.’

  ‘I didn’t say all my friends were dead too did I?’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘don’t take this the wrong way but you’ve been acting a little off kilter since yesterday. I know you can be a pain in the arse to work with sometimes,’ I was looking at the road but I knew he was smiling, ‘but for the last day you’ve just been plain weird. So are you going to tell me what the fuck is freaking you out?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I did.’

  ‘Try me,’ he said, and when I turned briefly to look at him I thought maybe that I could. Maybe I needed to offload. And then I heard his voice turn into a yell.

  ‘RACHEL, what the fuck!’

  I can still remember the look of terror on his face, as if something had taken possession of his whole body. I can still see his arm outstretched pointing to the road. There was a car coming right at us from the inside lane. How I hadn’t spotted it I don’t know, but I was going too fast to stop. I heard the sound of metal against metal, a crunch then a high-pitched screech of the cars meeting at high speed. Then I swerved right. The central reservation racing at us at 100 miles per hour. Everything speeded up, then stretched out in time. My foot was hard on the brakes but the car wasn’t stopping. I closed my eyes, braced for the impact. And then finally we stopped. About a metre away from the barriers. I waited for the impact of another car crashing into us. Jake shouted at me to drive. I turned the key in the ignition, hands shaking. There was a pain in my chest where my heart was beating so hard. Finally the car moved; I straightened it up and drove over to the hard shoulder, expecting the other car to have done the same. But it had disappeared out of sight. My head fell down on the steering wheel.

  ‘Fucking hell. What just happened there?’

  I tried to take a deep breath to slow my heartbeat.

  ‘There was nothing in front of me and then he was right there.’ My voice came out distorted as if I was talking through water.

  ‘I saw it,’ said Jake. ‘Fucking idiot had the whole road and pulled out right in front of you.’

  I wiped my eyes and realised I was crying again. And knowing I was crying made me cry even more. Jake found a tissue in my bag and handed it to me. ‘I’ll drive the rest of the way if you want.’

&
nbsp; I nodded my head and climbed into the back so he could move over into the driving seat. I was hollow and lifeless and empty, like a toy with the stuffing removed. I was crying about nearly dying, about Jonny, about you. About everything. But most of all I was crying because I wanted it to stop.

  Have you ever been in a place where your thoughts are scorched and the framework of your mind, the nuts and bolts that hold it together and the machinery that keeps it ticking over, has been dismantled? I ask you, Clara, because I thought I was beginning to grasp in some crude way what had happened to you all those years before. I thought I was on the precipice that night. I’m just glad no one told me how much further I had to fall.

  I dropped Jake off on the Harrow Road and drove up Chamberlayne Road and into Kensal Rise alone. There must have been snow in London earlier in the day – telltale deposits of grey slush lined the pavements – but the rain was coming down hard now and in a few hours it would be washed away.

  I turned into Kempe Road and found a parking space about six doors away from my flat. I can’t remember thinking anything, I certainly wasn’t glad to be home because I knew Jonny wouldn’t be there. I was numb and cold and I wanted to sleep so badly for the escape. I wanted a break from myself.

  So I wasn’t thinking or looking or taking in my surroundings. I was just walking up the path towards the front door and then I saw it: the light shining out from behind the white shutters in our living room. I looked away and shook my head because I didn’t believe what I was seeing. But when I looked again I knew that I wasn’t mistaken. Someone was in the flat.

  A huge crashing wave of relief engulfed me. I dropped my bag on the ground and started to laugh and then cry and laugh and cry until it became one hysterical noise. Jonny is home, Jonny is home. It was all I could think of – you know I never ever leave anything switched on, Clara – so it had to be him. And I must have been so deliriously happy I shouted it out: ‘Jonny is home!’ because my next-door neighbour Janice came out and said, ‘Is everything all right, Rachel?’, and I looked down at myself, wet through and shivering, and I nodded and picked up my bag and went inside.

  ‘Jonny?’ I called his name softly, like a question I was asking of myself. He didn’t answer. I went into the living room; it was empty. Cushions plumped and arranged in the same way I arranged them every day before I left, the Heal’s one with green and blue circles next to the Missoni one which was multicoloured stripes and then the white and black one with an outline of London that I hated but Jonny loved. They were all in order. Nothing had been touched.

  ‘Jonny?’ I called again, louder this time, running into the hall and through to the kitchen. All the surfaces were polished and clean. My plants on the windowsill lined up in ascending size.

  ‘JONNY.’ It wasn’t a question any more but a plea. There was a pulse in my throat. The relief that I had felt only a moment ago had mutated into a cold fear thumping through me. I screamed his name again and again but he wouldn’t answer. Then I ran into the bedroom. No light there, still dark. Still dark. My hand was on the light switch. I didn’t want to look.

  He needed to be in our bed, chest heaving, deep sleep breaths, oblivious to what was going on. I needed to touch and smell him and drink him in. I needed him to wrap me up in one of his hugs and hold me so tight the breath would almost be squeezed out of me. He needed to be there because if he wasn’t, nothing was right, nothing would ever be right.

  I flicked the switch and kept my eyes closed.

  Then I opened them.

  Just an empty bed.

  Nothing would ever be right.

  I was still for a moment, perfectly still. And then I looked around, searching for something. Something had changed. My eyes scanned every corner and crevice of the room. White cotton sheets taut over the bed, cushions propped up against the pillows. Jonny’s unread books stacked up on his bedside table. His side was the messiest. An old glass of water. A notepad. Painkillers. Everything was as we had left it and yet something had shifted.

  Then a glimpse, and it clicked into place, like a camera finding its focus.

  I inhaled. Deep breaths and it was the smell that told me. It wasn’t Jonny. It wasn’t me. It was someone else. And it was fresh. My eyes took me to the dressing table. There were cleansers, eye cream, hand cream, a candle in green fig, my favourite scent. There was perfume, Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue. Some tulips in a vase, now empty of water. And there was a photograph. Framed in black. A picture that captured the gentle warmth of an evening in Ibiza. Me and Jonny drunk on sunshine. I blinked. That image was coming from memory. It was gone; someone had replaced it with a photograph of a woman and a teenage girl. The woman’s dark hair was falling over her face, partially covering one eye. Her freckled cheeks were red from the sun and she had smile lines creasing out like little streams from her eyes. One arm was round the girl whose lips were upturned in a smile that looked contented and warm. The teenager next to my mother wasn’t me. It was you. A photograph taken on a warm summer’s day ten years ago. The day before my mother died.

  Chapter Seven

  December 1993

  YOU ARE COMING to tea, to my house, which means you’ll meet my mum. I don’t have friends for tea, not normally, not ever. I don’t tell you that you’re special, I think you already know. And when I told you about my mum, how she’s not like other mums, you just smiled and said: ‘At least you have one, mine left me and my dad when I was a baby.’ Somehow that makes me feel better. Another thing we have in common: mothers who fuck us up.

  We’re out of breath from walking up Ditchling Road. It’s March but more winter than spring and we’re fighting against the wind. ‘Nearly there,’ I say as we turn into Dover Road. I stop outside a house and search for my keys in my rucksack.

  ‘Is this it?’ you ask.

  I look and see I’ve stopped outside Mrs Reagan’s house. The neat garden, freshly weeded, and the red front door that has no paint flaking from it and the curtains with the tie-backs arranged just so and picture frames on the windowsill. I can’t see the photographs they contain and I haven’t been in her house but I know they’re of smiling children on sunny days. Happy families. I shake my head and grip my keys. They are slippery in my hand.

  ‘’S’a bit further down,’ I say.

  Our door is blue, faded, paint cracking. It’s number twenty-one but the two has fallen off so the postmen always get confused. There are no curtains in the living room, Niamh thinks they’re bourgeois, so instead we have an enormous ethnic print sheet that she brought back from India years ago. She hangs it from the window in the same way they do in the student houses on Lewes Road. ‘Home sweet home,’ I say as we walk up the path.

  The air is thick and sweet. Some people’s houses smell of Daz or fabric softener, or lavender air freshener, but mine always has the same heady sweet smell from the cigarettes Niamh smokes. I stick my head round the living-room door and see her sprawled out on the sofa in a kaftan, hair held up by a pencil. Her eyes are glassy and she’s looking up to the ceiling, blowing perfect circles in smoke. Sometimes I think her face is sinking into itself; her cheeks are hollowed out, her eyes too deep in her head, but still there is no denying her beauty, or at least the shadow of a beauty that has long passed. Oprah is on the TV but she’s not watching. Her arm is outstretched, the cigarette suspended from her fingers. I see the ash ready to fall on to the carpet.

  ‘Hello d a r ling.’ She says it loudly and without looking at me. You don’t say anything but you must be surprised by my mother’s vowels, which go on forever, unlike mine. I haven’t told you she comes from a posh family with a big house and a horse, have I? She threw all the education and breeding back in their faces. My Aunty Laura said my mother told her parents she didn’t need their money. How I laugh now when I think of her rich-girl arrogance.

  ‘We’re going to get a drink,’ I say.

  She doesn’t look up, just wafts me away with her hand like I’m cigarette smoke in her eyes.

 
You go a bit quiet, like you’re weirded out by Niamh, and I’m beginning to regret bringing you. What if you tell everyone at school my mother’s a nutcase? I shudder when I think of the shame of it.

  In the kitchen. The breakfast dishes are still on the table, leftovers of my morning Weetabix have hardened in the bowl. I clear them away and put them in the sink.

  ‘You OK?’ I ask. ‘We can grab something and take it to the park.’

  ‘What, and freeze our arses off out there?’ You give me a little push. Maybe it will be all right after all.

  I wash two glasses and fill them up with Vimto, which Niamh drinks by the gallon in the morning to quench the wine thirst from the night before.

  ‘Stay here,’ I tell you as I walk back into the living room. ‘What’s for tea?’ I ask Niamh louder than necessary. I make it sound like an everyday question. She ignores me. ‘I have a friend from school,’ I say, quieter this time, ‘is there anything to eat?’

  She throws her cigarette butt in the ashtray and looks up. ‘A friend? That’s nice.’

  ‘Is there anything we can have for tea, Niamh?’

  She sighs and rubs her eyes. ‘You’re hardly going to starve, are you darling?’

  I don’t bite back but I don’t move either and finally she lets out a long sigh like a deflating balloon. ‘Oh for God’s sake, there’s a pizza menu on the fridge, ring for one, and order some extra for me. A plain margherita, I don’t like any of that crap they put on them.’ She doesn’t look at me once.

  We sit in the kitchen eating our Hawaiian and drinking Vimto. We listen to the Verve and Boyzone and All Saints on a tape I recorded from the top forty countdown which gets annoying when the DJ keeps interrupting the songs. We’re about to go upstairs when Niamh comes into the room bringing a trail of smoke with her.

  She opens the fridge and leans on the door for a moment.

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us, Rachel?’ she says while peering in the fridge. It’s empty save for a mushy cucumber, some yoghurts and milk. And wine, always wine. ‘I appear to have brought this girl up without any manners.’